Dan Hebda - Chief Strategy Officer at Mega

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) That's leaderbits.io. Today, we are talking to Dan Hebda, the Chief Strategy Officer at Mega, and we discuss how to become useful, trusted, and influential, the importance of consistently delivering tangible value, and avoiding complexity when cleaning up simple problems. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:00:52) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Hey, there he is. Welcome to Awesomeville.

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:10) Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) That's where you live?

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:12) Yep. That's where I live. You see it over there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) Oh, yeah. What state are you in?

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:18) I'm in Massachusetts. The sign is a joke from my Parisian colleagues for Americans using the word "awesome" too frequently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:28) Really?

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:01:30) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) I love it, man. I'll say awesome to that. And the trees are beautiful, though. They're changing.

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:39) Yeah. The trees are nice. They're changing color. It's fall. Where are you located?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) We're in Florida.

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:44) Okay. So you don't have the same type of seasonal change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) No. But my wife and I, we go up to Blairsville, Georgia, Murphy, North Carolina, and we see the leaves change. We go hiking.

(Dan Hebda at 00:01:56) Oh, very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Yeah. Yeah. So, very cool. I saw you write some articles on CIO. That's awesome, man.

(Dan Hebda at 00:02:04) Yeah. We had a few going there for a while. They're changing their format, so some of those are going to disappear. But we had an opportunity for a while to post some articles up there on transformation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) Nice. You enjoy writing a lot?

(Dan Hebda at 00:02:19) Writing is maybe not my thing. Thinking, reading, consuming, and dialoguing, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) Thinking, reading, consuming, dialoguing. All right. I got it. So you're like a process filter. You consume and then communicate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:35) Yeah.

(Dan Hebda at 00:02:35) And that's where it fits my role as the strategy officer. It's kind of taking the pulse of the market, checking what's going on with the analysts, the industry in general, and processing it, helping direct the company and the product in the right direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) So you provide that as a service to a company? So, I'll say I'm

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:02:51) in this industry, and then you come in, and you figure out what's going on, and

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) then you come back to me and tell me what's going on?

(Dan Hebda at 00:02:59) A little bit. So the company I work for, Mega, does that. My role in particular for the organization is the Chief Strategy Officer for Mega. So I provide the input to my own company in terms of the direction, the product evolution, et cetera, that we need to address in order to hit market needs and hopefully stay ahead of the curve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) Okay. So you're the internal version of what your company

(Dan Hebda at 00:03:20) does? Yeah. To some extent. I think what the company does is a little bit broader than my role by and of itself. But, yes.

(Dan Hebda at 00:03:27) Are you familiar with Mega at all and what we cover?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) I'm not. I've read the description of what Mega is, and it's got a cool name. It doesn't sound small.

(Dan Hebda at 00:03:37) Yeah. And we even have mega.com, which is pretty great. I get funny looks when I tell people, you know, mega.com, and they associate it to the individual out of Australia or what have you. There's the New Zealand Mega website that was known for peer-to-peer secured conversation and file sharing, a little bit to get out of the government eye. So we got a number of calls on that. No. Mega is a software company, and we focus on essentially architecture designing. And that goes from strategy, capabilities, process, technology, systems, infrastructure, risk, and all of it goes together. So part of what we do is similar to my role where we can help with direction, strategy, et cetera. But much of it goes into a lower level detail, looking at applications, which ones are healthy, providing the functionality needed, which ones aren't, and then helping the organization set a course to a better, healthier application portfolio and general architecture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:32) That's awesome. So you help companies that both build software too, some of them. Right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:04:38) Oh, they can be anything. We typically deal with Fortune 1,000. And so it can be financial institutions. It can be manufacturing. Really, we don't have a vertical that we're stuck in. And all of these companies, in particular the larger organizations, they end up with challenges due to their size. So when you're that large and you've got such a technological presence—you know, I have customers who measure their application inventory in the thousands. And when you've got to make sure that they're running, they're delivering the functionality for your customers, whether they're internal or external, that the integrations are functioning well, the data is properly encrypted and secured, that you're not violating any regulation, for example, with GDPR, the California Privacy and Protection Rules. You know, that scale just comes inherently with complications, and we help them address that through architecture, essentially designing how all of that should work.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:05:28) That's

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) amazing. So sometimes you write code. Other times you just write process for how code should be written?

(Dan Hebda at 00:05:35) Yeah. Yeah. That's one way to look at it. Now myself, I no longer write code. But the customer, let's say, you'll have the app development level, and we help design the particular—we're not going to do the development. We can help design the application, the application architecture. More and more with the trend of the low-code, no-code, et cetera, we're looking kind of at services that have been encapsulated and just how they're architected to fit a certain purpose. And then we're doing that all the way up to the strategy and business level. This way, you can have the business and the organization and the IT having a conversation with a common dialogue. So, typically, we're at what's referred to as capabilities in terms of the conversation. We're discussing capabilities. They can be broad-sweeping business level capabilities. They can be detailed technological capabilities. But really, what are the capabilities needed for the business to achieve whatever transformation it's going through. And then from there, you can decompose it as you stated into what are the processes that may be human-executed, what are the processes that may be automated or run by certain systems, what services maybe need to be brought online, and how are they going to integrate with the rest of the ecosystem. How do all the pieces fit together? And then how does the information essentially flow across those systems in order to deliver the right outputs to the right people at the right time in a secure, regulatory-compliant, et cetera, all the tick boxes that you need in a manner?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) That's amazing. It's like you go into the messy entangled wires, and you undo everything, understand the environment, clean it up, and then you provide information going forward, how to do things going forward. Because you have to first understand it when you get a new customer. Right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:07:10) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And we used to use the analogy of a spaghetti. So the tangle of wires—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) There you go.

(Dan Hebda at 00:07:14) Same notion. Yeah. Exactly. You go and you have to understand. Now there's debate in the industry, the depth and degree to which that understanding should begin with. And so if you're at a Fortune 1,000 organization, you don't need to understand every aspect of the entirety of the organization. You'll pick areas that are problem areas, and you'll look to kind of dissect that section of the wire nest, if you will, untangle that piece, get that straightened out, and then move on to the next piece and move on to the next piece. So you really want to ensure in what we do that you're always addressing real problems, providing value, and then growing and expanding it and not getting stuck on one knot that maybe you sit on for a while and not delivering the value and the outcome. So it's really about visible, tangible benefit delivered consistently. And if you're not delivering that, then you start to fall behind. And you can imagine with the pace of technology these days, you know, that curve of how long you have to deliver some value is shrinking every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:12) Yeah. No. That's beautiful. It sounds like a lot of fun. It sounds like in another life, a job I would work. Right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:08:19) It really is. It's pretty amazing right now. It's one of those areas in jobs where you get to kind of get exposure to a lot of different technology in a lot of different industries without having to deep dive into each one where you might get consumed by it. And so we have companies that are facing all sorts of digital challenges today in their transformation, and some are simply trying to clean up legacy. That's a pretty common one that's across the board. But there are many that are trying to really stay away from being disrupted or themselves to come up with a disruption and looking at the emerging technology to say, okay. What might this mean to my business, and then what would the implications be in the architecture? And so if we take a generic one like a blockchain or some form of distributed ledger, okay, there's a lot of buzz around that, especially in the financial industry. Well, the architects that we work with, they're going to look at it and say, okay. First, what capabilities could it deliver to the business? So the immutable distributed ledger, that could be one just to oversimplify. Okay. But now, also, what would it mean—what would it take for me to introduce that technology to our organization knowing the technological components we already have, the constraints, if you will, the legacy that needs to be managed, the different interfaces that need to be handled, what would it mean to fit into the architecture? And then as we do that and we present these ideas to the business, what risks or constraints might inherently exist in this distributed ledger? So in some capacity, you might say the ability to scale could be one of those concerns. Or does it address or is it accepted by a certain regulatory body as sufficiently secure and what have you. So the architects are looking ahead and then communicating back with the business to either answer the business's question where sometimes someone from the business side might say, I need this ability, and they might say, well, here's the technology for it. Or the architects themselves could say, hey. You know what? I was researching a new technology, and I see a digital opportunity that we could introduce to the business to help us stay ahead of the competition. So right now, where you get to kind of touch on all of these different challenges that these large organizations—and it's not limited to large, but they all have that problem of scale. When you really start to get into it, it is an exciting job and exciting industry to be in, and it's going through its own transformation, of course, as most are. So, yeah, it's something you should look into. I think you'd like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:50) Well, I mean, yeah. I already know I would love it. Right? Because it's just my style. I've been writing code since age eight. I'm in my early thirties now. I've gone into multiple industries from insurance to retirement planning and financial forecasting, all the way up to sports, and pretty much everything in between and then now in leadership development. So I enjoy being able to, I guess, rappel into an industry, understand, figure out what the important parts are, the meaningful parts of those businesses are without getting too tied into how percentages calculate in fixed index annuities. Right? You don't need to go that low, but, and then, you know, providing value. It's often so right in front of you about where the easy, low-hanging value fruit is, and it's the engineer in us that makes it more complicated.

(Dan Hebda at 00:11:52) Yeah. Many times, that's true. And the low-hanging fruit opportunities are often missed even by those same groups where when you create the type of initiative that I'm describing and they finally look at it, the degree of low-hanging fruit and savings, adjustment, corrective action that they can do rapidly often surprises them because they overestimate the complexity to clean up the simple thing. And so we've seen that before where organizations said, oh, man. You know, it's going to take me X years, and I've got to do all these heavy complex things of measurements and calculations. And then we start the process where it starts with a conversation and a review of kind of what's there, and they go, oh, wait. I could fix that. I can remove that. I could change that. And as soon as you start bringing visibility, they can make some of those low-hanging fruit changes quickly. From there, you can actually change the conversation where it gets really interesting to just the way the world is changing. So I have a friend who's in the insurance industry. They cover automobiles. And he says, look. We're watching autonomous vehicles. Who owns the accident when that occurs, and what is car insurance? That's his job at the moment, is to define what will automotive insurance be in five to ten years when the driver isn't at fault. What are you insuring?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) This is the conversation we were having last week. We were—it wasn't on the podcast. I think it was with some friends. We were just hanging out being nerds. And we were having a conversation of, do you think they're smart enough to be thinking about that right now? We know that I know a lot of the old ones. Right? And some have an old mentality, but, you know, I got my start—one of my starts was in insurance technology and rating algorithms. And I was like, I wonder if they're smart enough up there to be thinking that far ahead, but they are. Some of them are, at least.

(Dan Hebda at 00:13:46) They are. Yeah. At least some of them are. And again, part of the conversation, not all of it, of course, within the business, but part of the dialogue is with the architecture group to look across and say, understand the technology, understand the business, understand the nuance, and design both the model for what will work and then the ability for the organization to support it, which, of course, today always includes some level of technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:08) Yeah. Because, all right. I'm an insurance company. I see this shift happening. All of a sudden, I'm going to be identifying the key players and how we can provide some sort of specialized policies so that Uber's fleet can be insured by us. Right? I want to figure out who my customer is going to be in a decade. I mean, if I was that large. Right? I mean, think who's my customer going to be in the decade? How is it going to shift? And then how can I bring them value today? Because, you know, when the Ubers were coming about, those were extraordinarily customized insurance policies that were very difficult to get. It's actually prevented some of the innovation.

(Dan Hebda at 00:14:44) Yeah. No. Exactly. So the way the transformation goes on in these different industries, there's the business dialogue. And when you imagine what you described and say, okay.

(Dan Hebda at 00:14:52) There's a shift. Let's say we want to cover the entire Uber fleet. Then we break it down as the capability language I described and say, okay, if that's the case, even before we get to the technology and our processes, generally speaking, then what capabilities do we need to possess in order to enable us to provide insurance to that entire fleet, to attract that customer, to retain that customer, and to deliver to that customer in a way they expect? Maybe even in a way that will set the expectation because we want to get ahead of the curve.

(Dan Hebda at 00:15:22) And then as we describe those capabilities, which is just high-level language, just conversational speech of what's required, then you can start drilling into them and say, okay, for this particular capability then, how do we expect that to happen? Kind of splitting what we want to do from how it's going to work. What technologies would be required? What kind of interfaces might be necessary?

(Dan Hebda at 00:15:45) What's the experience that the customer's going to go through, and does it meet their expectation? And so you can drive that dialogue further in a way that, again, begins with a conversation that works for both executive business and IT, as opposed to being a squarely IT conversation or a uniquely business conversation where they're maybe not on the same page.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:05) I love it. You're outcome-driven, and it's like you're a technology architecture think tank.

(Dan Hebda at 00:16:13) Yeah. Well, you helped create the think tank side. So yes, it's outcome-driven architecture, and that's actually what the industry is calling it. So great. No, wait.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:20) Is it really?

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:16:21) Yeah. The business outcome is—

(Dan Hebda at 00:16:23) The slight label. So it's business outcome-driven—

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:16:25) Oh.

(Dan Hebda at 00:16:25) Enterprise architecture in complete, but you're super close right there. And that's it. The think tank side is that we, as a company, don't try and become experts in the customer's industry. We work with them and say, you guys know your business. We know how to apply these methods and principles and teach you how to do it. We have tooling to support it to enable them to create their own think tank that we continue to support. And so, yeah, the notion you have is dead on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:52) Nice. I like it. Like I said, there's some businesses—I'd say out of all, like, we've done like 200 episodes—I would say maybe about 10 of them where I'm talking to the people, and I'm just like, oh, man, like, that's something I would do with my life. It's really cool. Because it fits my style, right? Of like, how I—like, I don't have to change how I think to be good at that.

(Dan Hebda at 00:17:18) No. What you described in your background too is that the architectural scope has gotten to a point where it's so diverse. You need to be conversant in strategy. As mentioned, that capability tier, you've got to get down to the processes, the application layer, the services layer, the infrastructure layer. You've got to be able to look across all of it for data and information, flow exchange, storage, et cetera, as well as risk. So you've got a lot of different perspective dimensions, and that seems to fit what you've described in terms of the diversity of liking—like, not that single narrow view, but a broad view. It's really a—I find it very interesting.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:17:54) Oh, yeah.

(Dan Hebda at 00:17:54) Most people have never heard of it. It's labeled, again, business outcome-driven EA or enterprise architecture. And I've—it's—I talked to—I was on a honeymoon at one point years ago, and my horseback riding—my wife and I—and the lady leading the trail says, oh, so what do you do? So I am an enterprise architect. I work in enterprise architecture. She says, oh, my son's an architect too. He was doing soil samples over at this. So I was like, no. I love that. But just let it go. Just go, yep, it's that thing a lot of people haven't heard of. But when they do, it tends to excite people. It really is cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29) Yeah. Well, they'll definitely be—this is not an industry that's getting smaller. Like, it's getting larger than what we've been doing.

(Dan Hebda at 00:18:35) Raising up too. Yeah. It's raising up. The complexity, the speed of change, the need to focus on the interfaces between technology more and more and create this ecosystem that everybody's dependent upon requires a design. The main shift in enterprise architecture over the last few years is the design used to be on get a lot of stuff heavy right up front. So the big things are going to last a long time, and so you've got to make those important decisions. Of course, that's no longer the reality today. So now it's how can I make it so that it can change rapidly? How can I make it that different smaller pieces can be exchanged for new ones that deliver new capabilities rapidly? And then what's required underpinning all that to make that work? How do we make that and enable that to happen?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) Isn't that amazing though how this completely pairs well with the progression in technology, even on a low level with how we design? Like, with the whole concept of, you know, when you first started talking, you said we make these big decisions upfront. In my head, what was flashing is purchasing internal servers, right? Whereas now, we just purchased like cloud servers, right? Like, we're all on AWS or some instance. And then eventually, we're removing even serverless concept where we don't even have to consider—like, have consideration for them. And I love it, but the way that it progresses is just—it's so exciting that we're in the future.

(Dan Hebda at 00:20:03) It really is remarkable. And as you just described, and I fully agree with the examples you laid out, that's part of the reason that this abstract dialogue goes on. It's not only to have the conversation with the business, but the other side is it's no longer about the literal server or virtual or serverless. It's about what is the general capability or function that needs to exist. And then somebody else can make the final decision on where it lands, how it's deployed, or what the architecture is as you go down the stream. So we start with the big picture, and we refine it. We refine it. We refine it. Some of your legacy stuff, and we have this with customers, some of these workhorses are still old mainframes on-site, and they're leaving them alone for now. They wrap them so they can interface to them, but they leave them alone for the moment. They're innovating, creating new services, new technologies to meet the new and/or set the new expectations for the customers. And then when need be, they go back and they're modernizing and moving them forward, and the options just continue to grow. So today, the architects are not looking to say, what's going to be my long-term decision here? They're going to say, I need to get this capability up. I need to provide this functionality to the business so they can operate. And I need to do it in a way that if they pivot to react to the market or to anticipate the market, then technologically, we can support that pivot in an efficient, effective, cost, et cetera, managed way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:23) The mentality has, like, drastically shifted. So early 2000s, it was build something cool. All the engineers, everyone's focused on that. All the engineer—you would just burn money and time just building it to be nerd cool because it was so far disconnected from the business. And now we've shifted into this new age where it's becoming—I'm feeling it even in the engineering culture where it's build something valuable. Let's just—I think everyone—we almost got exhausted from building stuff that didn't get used, and now we're just like, let's do the least amount of building to bring someone value so that I at least get that emotional—that dopamine hit of being useful to somebody.

(Dan Hebda at 00:22:09) That's—it's really funny, this dialogue, because you're hitting on some of our key phrases in the industry. And one of the key steps we have is that the architecture initiative's first step is useful. You've got to define useful. If you don't have a concrete audience stakeholder and can establish measurable useful, then you're not going to succeed. And also, to your point of the time scale, early 2000s, we ran into this notion just as you described. The IT groups were out looking for cool things, whether they built them or bought them. It was the shiny new thing. They wanted something cool, but there was not enough consideration for the benefit to the business. It was more about how cool it was. So there was kind of a frustration. Business and IT were separate, and the business would say, yeah, these IT guys are taking these things. Sure. They look cool to them. In the early 2000s, it wasn't the same shared understanding of technology, but we don't see where it fits. So it shifted them from there to the progression was the business really should set the direction. And so it became that, hey, IT, stop pursuing the cool stuff. Listen to the business. They're going to tell you where they need to go, and you enable it. Okay? Then we shift further. Now IT is business. Business is IT. There can't be a business without IT in a general sense. And so it's kind of come back to where that business-IT relationship is the business side says, okay, we need that cool stuff again. But now we want you to find cool stuff with a lens toward benefits of the business. And so it's a different dialogue. It's a very interesting dialogue where it's driving this massive rapid technological change and evolution, but with that lens of how is it helping the business. And in particular, because the business strategy is customer-obsessed, how is it addressing the need of the customer? And so that's really that evolution. And, again, it matches to your explanation as well. We see the same thing in our space, and it's really exciting at this point in time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) It's like setting the context of the cool stuff, right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:24:07) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, okay, we need the cool stuff, and we need the cool stuff even more because not only has the business expanded in their awareness of IT, but of course, the market, the customers. The IT experience and expectation of customers is dramatic. And so, yes, we need that cool stuff, but we need it delivered in such a way that differentiates our business, adds value to the customer and their experience in interacting with us. And so, yeah, let's drive more of this, and that's where the speed is just unbelievable right now, and it's a wild time to be participating in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:40) Yeah. So I'm going to share with you a little bit about what we're doing because I think it's a good fit in this conversation. But we did the podcast, right? And had it running, been doing over a year now, and we found this need for moving individual contributors into team leads. When they become team leaders as technologists, they have to learn how to be a leader, right, more than just writing code all day. And so people were—guests were coming on the show, and they said, hey, we hear you talking about leadership and this technology and this growth, and we need to teach our leaders that. Like, how do we do that? I'm like, I don't know. Like, Google for your answer. And so I looked around, and I didn't find, like, a whole lot. There was some, like, content libraries or whatnot, but it wasn't—it was just, like, average stuff. So I—so, like, 10 days, and I took, you know, all these principles of building and adding value. And I built this MVP in 10 days, and we deployed it to a couple people who were interested. And then it did really well. We just did these, like, little bits of technology leadership, and we ended calling it Leader Bits, like, bits of leadership. All right. Cool. Yeah. But then what happened for me was I just kind of, like, fell into that a little bit just as, like, a small little fun project, and it ended up—we're, like, a company now with employees and people and stuff. So it's very exciting, but the thing was is, like, all these things that we're talking about, I've been applying them to my business, and it's so useful. Like, now every single feature we build, there's, like, a story of how that brings the customer tangible value.

(Dan Hebda at 00:26:24) That's fantastic. I didn't have that approach before. That's funny. The synergy is wild. Yeah. It's remarkable. And I see the same thing. We see the need for leadership guidance related to IT for the same notion, the business and IT becoming really together, that leadership needs to fully understand and embrace how it functions, how it works. But, yeah, it's—I'm really intrigued at the way in which you've picked up on the different aspects of enterprise architecture and even the tag name of outcome-driven. It couldn't be more perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:50) That's one of our challenges. It's called an outcome-based approach. And they hear from, I think that one's with the CTO of Williams Sonoma, Yasir. And he's talking about an outcome-driven approach, and we're having a conversation about it. And then we give them a way to exercise it. So it's like this, like, a challenge, and then they do the exercise. And then that way, they learn something and they did something because I found myself listening to Audible a lot. And I'll list—do you like Audible?

(Dan Hebda at 00:27:21) No. I don't use it. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) No? You just read regular—

(Dan Hebda at 00:27:24) Maybe I'll have to start. Yeah. Oh. Videos. TED videos and regular reads. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29) TED—I'm a big fan of TED videos. But yeah. So I just would find myself watching these TED videos or Audible, and there's, like, 12 good ideas in the video, but then I don't do anything with it. And so then it's just like, I didn't—it's like reading the rules of a game. Like, you didn't actually make a move in the game. You just learned about how the game was played, and so for myself and then for others, I figured, well, let's build this content, but let's build it in a way that you learn something, but only enough to do something. So it's like a two-minute video with a one-minute challenge. It's like three minutes, and then we'd structure the challenge that you do something within the next seven minutes. So it's a 10-minute experience. But, yeah, I just—you're nerdy with user experience and the way that a product would be structured and developed, and this is, like, a perfect example of interviewing the customer and only building what they need and the entire—nothing in the product is like Joel. It's all just like I'm the middleman between the customer and what they want.

(Dan Hebda at 00:28:33) I love it. Have you heard of the Value Prop Canvas?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) No. Tell me about it.

(Dan Hebda at 00:28:37) So Value Prop Canvas is out of a group, I believe, called the Strategizer. I would check them out. And they've got a model that speaks to what you're looking at here, where, essentially, when you're looking to define products, you want to specify what is, essentially, the potential, the gains, the pain relief that it looks to provide, and align it to the different personalities or personas of customers that might leverage it and what their pain they're feeling or the gains that they need to achieve are. And it's just a different way of dialogue, very similar to what you're describing. So I would check it out because it might give you some semantic structure to exactly what you're already doing. I love the small scale of what you described, three minutes. That's very digestible. Very much big fan of that. So sounds great. I'm going to look into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) Oh, yeah. Like, we're—I'm just excited because, like, I feel useful, right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:29:27) Yeah. I love it. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) It's back to the building code for, and it was funny because I wrote the first version, but then I hired a full-time engineer, Nick, and he said the coolest thing about this project is people are on it. Because apparently for the past, like, four years, his work has just been—I mean, the MVP space is, like, still really hot for building something with people just spending their money trying to build something, and then they get lost in that. You know, there's this old story in the United States. I can't remember where it was. I think it's, like, in North Carolina.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) There was this woman. She was very wealthy, and her husband had passed away, so she would have construction going on in her property all the time just to have people there. And they would build, like, staircases to nowhere. Have you heard of this?

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:30:09) See where

(Dan Hebda at 00:30:10) you're going with this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) Yeah. I don't

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:30:11) know that story, but it may. Yeah. But I

(Dan Hebda at 00:30:13) see where you're going with it. Actually, she

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) was, like, scared of being alone, so she would have these construction workers over at her house. So if you go to the—you can go to it. Like, you can go to it. It's—I know it's on the East Coast, and you're in Boston area, or you're in Massachusetts. Right?

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:30:26) That's what you said? Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) Yeah. So it's around, like, East Coast, and there's just, like—I saw a video of it. Like, staircases, like, everywhere. You open up a closet, and there's, like, seven steps of a staircase right into just, like, the wall. And she would just say, "I don't care what you do. Just build stuff."

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:41) And for me, that's, like, the perfect analogy to some of these applications.

(Dan Hebda at 00:30:48) Yeah. No, so let me go back to that method I mentioned with useful because I think it's gonna follow the progression, and I expect you've already made it to the next tier. It's a very simple progression we try and teach as it relates to architecture. And because the term or the phrase enterprise architecture is not as well recognized, when you go into an organization and say, "Look, we're gonna help you set up this practice," we start off as noisy. People go, "I don't really know what that is. It's this new thing. I've heard of it before. Maybe I don't like what I heard before." Our first step is useful, and that's a requirement.

(Dan Hebda at 00:31:18) If you're not useful, you don't go anywhere. You've gotta become useful. As you become useful, and it sounds as you mentioned that you're at that level, you then look to become trusted. So as people consume a few of these bytes or bits that you've got going on, right, they go through them, they hit the value, they like the outcome, they go, "Wow. I'm gonna go after more," and they start seeking it out more.

(Dan Hebda at 00:31:39) It's a trusted thing. I'm going to go to that place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) It's like Simon Sinek. Yeah.

(Dan Hebda at 00:31:44) As you get to that, you jump to influential. And that's where you can really start driving changes. And for us at the architecture tier, that's when we have the architects part of the conversation to help drive capability change, to help drive strategy within an organization, but it aligns to your progression as well. And I wouldn't doubt, again, that you're already on that path moving beyond useful and getting up to trusted and influential. That's very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) No, that's—you know, what I started doing was just taking testimonials from—like, I wanna be like, if you have a product that's not useful, that's a huge problem. Your business is going away. So I make a point to spend time with my customers, and I get on video calls, and I say, "Look. What did you like? What didn't you like? How could it be better?" And then they tell me, and then I meet with them again in six weeks. I show them the experience, the improvements already, and we go over that. And it's literally just, like, over and over and over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:37) And then we get the video testimonials, and we just put them on the website, and it's just like—I had—we did our first round of financing. And so, but anyways, it was very—so at the presentation, I just—here's our financial projections, and I just played testimonial videos.

(Dan Hebda at 00:32:57) Nice. I was like

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) I was like, "Here's someone else who loves it. Here's someone else who loves it." And I'm like, "I'm not sure exactly if this is how normal presentation pitches go, but I just want you to—if you walk away with anything today, know that we have cash flow, or we have revenue, and people love what we do, and my job is going to be just doing that more."

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:33:21) So. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) You have to—first of all, did you come up with this useful, trusted, influential? Because it's, like, brilliant.

(Dan Hebda at 00:33:30) Not me personally, but a colleague at Mega had come up with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:33) Okay. We're gonna, like, give you a shout out. That's gonna be, like, a content clip of you talking about useful. That's just so good, dude. And it reminded—do you know Simon Sinek? You have to have come across him. You like TED Talks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, he is—isn't he amazing?

(Dan Hebda at 00:33:49) Fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) I love his thoughts. But okay. So you are—are you—have you written a book? Has Mega put out a book yet? Because this is, like, good stuff.

(Dan Hebda at 00:33:57) We haven't. So as a software company, we do offer services as well. We don't have a book out, though some of the employees are working on more white papers, research notes, and there is an employee working on a book on his own. And so we may see content more of this coming out shortly. But in the meantime, we can put up white papers and other on the change.

(Dan Hebda at 00:34:15) In particular, the architecture in an agile world, kind of what that means as companies try and take these principles and really scale them across agile initiatives. So there is a lot of change going on, a lot of research going on, and we're happy to share some of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Because part of your business is creating this stuff. But, like, if you own the standard, that's a really good place to be.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:34:38) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) Yeah. So you mentioned there's, like, tools, and how would I learn more? So, like, I guarantee you, I'm gonna get so many questions about this because this is not an overtalked topic. If anything, it's underserved. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:54) How are people—are there good books? Are there some real thought leaders in this space? Where can people go to get more of this?

(Dan Hebda at 00:35:01) See, that's an interesting question. There are different avenues to learn more about enterprise architecture. Some of them are a bit behind. And so, of course, you could start on our website, mega.com. You can find information there.

(Dan Hebda at 00:35:14) I'm happy to have people reach out to me as well, and I can help direct them to other sources where they might have a larger stream of information to keep the conversation going. But they're starting to show up. A few colleges are starting to offer this as courses. Of course, the analysts do research on enterprise architecture. So that's starting to spread as well.

(Dan Hebda at 00:35:34) So there are different avenues. But because it is going to change, you do have to check some of the sources to see

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:35:40) where they're at on that progression and if they're on the, kind of, the modern edge or

(Dan Hebda at 00:35:40) if they're a little bit behind. And so, again, in the meantime, I'm happy to receive questions, etcetera, and dialogue with people. No problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:51) I vote you do a book.

(Dan Hebda at 00:35:53) Like, I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) Like, the way you talk, like, it's beautiful. Like, I want a—I would listen to you for more than a book. Your information's so good. And then what will happen is that will allow for colleges to teach good information that you have to the next generation. Now you get the added benefits of growing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) It's just gotta. It's got great people and brilliant ideas. But you're gonna have a bottleneck of talent. These colleges are going to be your pools, but you owe it to the colleges. You owe it to yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) It should be a selfish thing because you need that talent. So if you put that book out, people are gonna start learning from that, and then now you have a talent pipeline.

(Dan Hebda at 00:36:37) Yeah. That it's a great progression. I'll have to start working on the book, but we are working on the college-based talent pipeline. We're discussing with some of the schools as to how we can incorporate our software and our methods into their curriculum to help drive that progress. So that is an avenue we're looking at for sure.

(Dan Hebda at 00:36:55) But the book thing will take me a little bit more time, I imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) So do you guys design, like, in that? I'm just curious. There's been a couple companies I've been watching that have been exploding with—they'll go into the colleges, and they will be the tech—the content generator for the programming courses. So, Florida State University wants to offer programming. Instead of them hiring core professors to create the content, they'll hire this company and, like, white label it. And I've seen them grow from, like—I've seen two of them specifically go from, like, 10 people to a thousand people in the past three years.

(Dan Hebda at 00:37:36) Yeah. So we're not on the content creation side, at least not today. Yeah. But we do—we do consume the tools. We enable content creation typically by our customer base.

(Dan Hebda at 00:37:46) And so they can create visions and views for how these architectures all work to connect the dots between strategy through the process capabilities, etcetera. And in the curriculum, of course, we could help seed some of the content for the courses as we look to grow that talent pipeline as you described it. But we're not today in the content business. That's an avenue, of course, we are looking at because there are different industry-specific views and standard approaches that support this work. But today, we kind of integrate with them and leverage existing content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:15) Oh, that's fine. Yeah. Because if you can get, like, the 80% of the base laid and then just teach them some of the 20% that makes you guys unique about how you think a little bit differently, then that's a win. Right? Is that what we're going for?

(Dan Hebda at 00:38:27) Yeah. It's a little more than that, but that's on the general page. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) Nice. Nice. How does your team look? Do you have—do you have, like, a team, or how does it look?

(Dan Hebda at 00:38:39) Yeah. I have a small team. So I'm chief strategy officer. I've got a product marketing team, which is a group of two to three individuals. We're kind of in between right now, so I've lost one, and I'm hiring.

(Dan Hebda at 00:38:49) So I'm at the two, getting back to the three. And we liaise closely with the product ownership team. Those are the individuals that are directly unaccountable for the future functionality of each of the different product sets on our platform. And so that team is somewhere around ten today. And so we work very closely together.

(Dan Hebda at 00:39:07) And then I'm also part of the board, and so we help have, like, dialogue in the conversation there. So those are kind of the main avenues. As product marketing and strategy, I'm also a general kind of resource for many aspects of the business. So if you've got a certain strategic sale that's going on and they need to have a certain angle or a vision represented, they need to ensure the product's got a certain coverage, then I'll play a role on that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:32) Yeah. And you guys have your—like you mentioned, you have your own software that helps deal with all of this. So you're not—you're sharing in the struggle. Like, you understand exactly what other software-producing companies are

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:39:45) Oh, yeah.

(Dan Hebda at 00:39:45) Yeah.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:39:45) Yeah.

(Dan Hebda at 00:39:46) Yeah. We're going through transformation ourselves. We have the same challenges to work to address. So, you know, the move to agile, the dealing with the customers, the usefulness, all of what you described, we have all of those same challenges to face. That's a different mentality, especially—Mega's been around for a long time.

(Dan Hebda at 00:40:02) We founded it in 1991. Oh, wow. Some of the technology was originally written even with a previous company going back to '86. And so the shift from individuals who may be—they're not still around, but the mentality is still around of some of where they came from and that transition to agility. It's definitely a contrast.

(Dan Hebda at 00:40:20) It's a big contrast. So, yeah, we come from a position where we understand what the customers are going through. The big difference between Mega and most of our customers is scale. I'm not a Fortune 1,000, and many of our customers are in Fortune 100. So, you know, we're a bit smaller than that, but we understand what they're facing, and we work with them regularly to help address these concerns at a small and scaled level.

(Dan Hebda at 00:40:47) So it's wild. It's really a wild time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:49) You've been at Mega for quite a while.

(Dan Hebda at 00:40:52) I have. I started Mega in early 2001, so I'm fast approaching 18. And I've held pretty much every kind of department. I've been involved in in some capacity. So started out in consulting and then advising and actually interacting directly with the customers full time. Moved in to cover that, but also cover IT and manage technical support. So to take the customer-focused experience I had and really apply it to helping support where customers face different challenges. For a short duration, I even was developing some of the functionality with the lab.

(Dan Hebda at 00:41:27) That was when I really started. Because out of school, I'm a software developer, so I have the development background. Let me see. From there, I covered into presales and owned and managed that for a while. Expanded on the presales to eventually run the US operations, which included managing sales. Now I'm in the strategy and covering marketing.

(Dan Hebda at 00:41:46) So I've had some exposure to the lab, to sales, to consulting, to tech support, to management, to board, etcetera. So it's been an interesting nearly 18 years. It's been really wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) I've—that's amazing. I have got to ask. All right. So now that we're going through this scaling sales, right, any advice you have for me?

(Dan Hebda at 00:42:07) On sales?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:07) Yeah. So I—yeah. For—we have to scale sales. Like, we just closed our first funding round, like, this week, and we are now scaling our sales beyond just me calling people and selling them Leaderbits.

(Dan Hebda at 00:42:23) So my generic thing on sales would be twofold. Of course, first, you've gotta make sure you've got the right marketing awareness and visibility. That will just help sales. The second is—and this is gonna sound like it's a problem as well—sales is about talent and talent management, and you've gotta respect—and a lot of people don't. The businesses I've come across, they all—sales is kinda thing anybody can do. Not true. Sales is a true talent, and if you find talented sales and you nurture talented sales, then you can grow sales. But if you don't recognize that it's a genuine talent and skill, then you'll struggle.

(Dan Hebda at 00:42:55) You'll hire bodies who won't execute. And so it's more than numbers. It's about context. It's about feeling. I know that sounds bizarre.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) No, it doesn't.

(Dan Hebda at 00:43:03) Sales is really about reading that customer and getting it. So for me, that's the advice I would give. I've seen management shift away from sales recognition of a skill and toward. And every time they recognize it as a skill, sales grows and expands and scales quite well. And that's really where you need to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:19) 100%. So I had no sales background. I can, I'm passionate about what I do, but that's not sales. Sales, like, there's a process to it, which I've recently learned to some degree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:33) So I started, you know, when we started this, I realized for me to prove that it worked, my engineering side, for it to prove the model, I'm going to have to make a sale, and there's no one else around to make a sale but me. So I literally googled and I found Brian Tracy sales courses. Have you ever heard of this guy?

(Dan Hebda at 00:43:51) I don't know him, but we do have a sales trainer we leverage too. And after the podcast, I can share his info. He's pretty great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:56) Oh, please do. So this guy is like from the seventies. So all his videos are like, you would watch him on VHS. But he had said a couple key sentences that, like, where I knew I would enjoy him as a human. And so I started listening to stuff he said, and a lot of the stuff he was saying was connecting value and he was saying good things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) And so I started listening to him some more and then working the sales process like that. But what I realized is it's very much like engineering or anything where if you are responsible as the leader to be able to identify those high quality or hyper quality, whatever, people. The people that have that difference, that just that little bit of, I don't know what it is, but it's what you were describing earlier. And it's 100% a talent. You could get a developer that could produce X features per hour, technically correct against whatever specification.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) But then there's that developer that just sees what the others don't see, that just makes that one calculated move that puts you over the top and improves. And so, yeah, it's always about the people, right?

(Dan Hebda at 00:45:07) It's about people. The other thing I would mention, and you use the word process, that sales is a nonlinear process. If you treat it as a linear process, you get bottlenecked and stuck where you don't belong. It's really event driven. So you've got certain aspects which should prompt reaction or anticipatory action from your side, but don't go through a series of checkboxes to try and complete a sale.

(Dan Hebda at 00:45:27) You want to really deliver and respond to what the customers are looking for, which sounds to be already your model, so I've got no red flags from this dialogue. Being useful is one of those key pieces. If you take that useful premise and apply it to sales, you'll be in the right place to just get ahead of the conversation. But some organizations say, oh, at this point in the process, I'm supposed to send you this, you know, flyer. And the customer might say, but I don't want, I don't want to find out, but the process says that's next.

(Dan Hebda at 00:45:53) So stay away from the linear process kind of approach and don't be so literal. It's more event, reacting to customer needs, giving them what they want, build the trusted relationship, and recognize the talent, and then you'll be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:05) It's like someone having someone come to dinner and telling you what order to eat your food. It's like, that's insane.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:46:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) Well, I found out it didn't work because, like, I write some article, and they're like, oh, you gotta have this pipeline and go through the station. And so I built this pipeline, and I put people where I think they would be. I realized, no, it doesn't work like that. It's not like first appointment, second appointment. Like, there are people, and they have varying levels of interest, and everybody's moving on their own speed, and everyone sees your product slightly different, so you just have to really figure out, first of all, if you're even valuable to them to continue the conversation. And it's okay to be like, we're just not valuable to them, right? And we just move on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) And, yeah, it's just, it's what it really is though is it's like human relationships. It's like dating. Like, you can't just walk in and say, I'll buy you a drink. At least we have...

(Dan Hebda at 00:47:05) No. Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) Laugh, and then you could fill in the blank. Well, you have to just, I guess, in the most human way, you have to go with the flow. You have to just feel it out, and everyone's different. Like, everyone's unique.

(Dan Hebda at 00:47:20) Exactly. You gotta learn. Yeah. It's always about learning new experiences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:23) Yeah. So next time I'm really, I like you. Next time I'm up in your area, how far are you from Boston?

(Dan Hebda at 00:47:30) Depends on the traffic and the time of day. It's about forty-five minutes with no traffic, and it's not far. I mean, I can get to Boston easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:37) Yeah. So next time I'm in town because I have a lot of friends from the podcast and everything in the Boston area. Next time I'm around there, I'm gonna stop by, say hello to you, or reach out to you before I before my travels and...

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:47:48) Perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) Maybe come by the office and just say what's up.

(Intro/Outro Music or Sound Effect at 00:47:51) I...

(Dan Hebda at 00:47:52) I would love to see it. Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) People want to find out more about you, LinkedIn, email, how, what's your preferred method of contact?

(Dan Hebda at 00:48:00) Either one. LinkedIn or email is fine. And so, email is [email protected]. You can also go to the website, www.mega.com, and you can look up my name, Daniel Hebda, on LinkedIn, and get me from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:11) Nice. And do you prefer Daniel or Dan?

(Dan Hebda at 00:48:14) Conversationally Dan, but all the written is under Daniel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) Okay. Cool. Yeah. I always ask people for the intro and everything what they like. Man, this is awesome. I really enjoyed this. Did you have a good time?

(Dan Hebda at 00:48:25) Oh, fantastic. Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26) Yeah. Thank you so much. And then Jake will loop back in. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:43) If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.

(Dan Hebda at 00:49:03)